Celestial Season

BENSON, Ariz. — "There's a black spot on Jupiter!" exclaimed an amateur astronomer, focusing her telescope skyward.

"It must be dust on your lens. Let me look through the Newtonian telescope," a fellow enthusiast retorted. The 14 1/2-inch Newtonian reflector telescope was rotated toward the heavens. A moment later he shouted: "You're right. I see the same speck on my scope. Check the charts."

After a scramble to the celestial maps, a cheer went up among the dozen people gathered in the room as it became clear that the dot was actually the shadow of the moon Europa passing in front of Jupiter. My wife, Loretta, and I smiled at each other, bemused at the hoopla over a speck.

We were standing on the rooftop observatory at Skywatcher's Inn, a four-room inn with a 14-foot silver dome. It's located on a remote hilltop three miles southeast of Benson, about an hour's drive south of Tucson.

We found out about the inn several months ago when we were planning a weekend adventure in Arizona. Loretta spotted a tiny ad for the inn in Earth magazine. Founded by a Tucson pathologist whose astronomy hobby got out of hand, Skywatcher's Inn seemed like a good place to ground ourselves in the peace of Arizona's Sonoran Desert and study the universe above. Neither of us knew much about astronomy, but that didn't intimidate us.

Friday morning we started the nine-hour drive from our home in Southern California, stopping in Phoenix to pick up my sister Karen, who lives there, and a niece, Karen Michelle, who was visiting from Delaware. We arrived at the inn, a ranch-style stucco structure, late in the afternoon. Our hostess, Cleo Douglass, greeted us warmly and set out a plate of chocolate chip cookies. She asked when we wanted breakfast and gave us a tour of the inn and an overview of its 65-acre grounds bordering the San Pedro River before showing us our rooms.

The rooms, with private baths, were individually decorated. Loretta and I had the Garden Room, which had flower-print draperies and bedspread and garden view. Karen and Karen Michelle settled into the Galaxy Room, with a white domed ceiling, which doubles as a planetarium for stargazing lessons on cloudy days, Douglass told us. We peeked into the Egyptian Room. For $110 a night, it contained a stunning, marble-lined Jacuzzi and a faux Egyptian armoire.